From the Flightstory Archives: Best of – Part 3
My Dad And Those Wonderful Flying Machines
By Earlaiman
October 2, 2002
It was back in the early thirties; I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. I remember I was still small enough for my dad to carry me on his shoulders when we went to see the airplanes.
Barnstormers used to fly in and use the pastures along the road north of our home in Southeastern Michigan on summer weekends. They would line their airplanes tail by tail along the barbed wire fences that lined the drainage ditches along the road. This was rural country then, and there were a number of fields, flat and green pastures, perfectly suitable for cows and red, green, blue and yellow biplanes with their shining doped skins, lacquered laminated wood props and leather trimmed cockpits.
We didn’t have much money and dad never had enough for that two dollar ride he wanted to treat me and my brother to so badly. Every weekend he wished he had, and he promised “…someday son, someday I’ll take you for a ride in one of those airplanes.”
We went out to the “airfields” almost every summer Sunday to watch the planes come and go, or to wander up and down the row inspecting the two, three or four who might have flown in that weekend, looking into the cockpits, staring up at the big rotary engines with their shining black and brass parts and fixtures.
There wasn’t much money around in those days and the machines mostly sat idle along the fence being looked at more than they came and went. Dad seemed to know many of the pilots and they would sit, smoke and talk about things.
I remember, only once did dad mention the day that one of those airplanes had a problem and came down in a crash. He ran across the field and helped the pilot out of the wreck, carried him back across the field and drove him to the hospital. That was before my time, or I was too young to remember the incident, but my mother did. She remarked how his best Sunday white shirt was torn and stained by the blood of the pilot and how his suit had to be sent to the cleaners. The pilot recovered, flew away somewhere and he never saw him again.
Those were wonderful summer days and wondrous machines which evoked dreams of clear blue skies and puffy white clouds in far away places.
A favorite picture around our house was a PanAm Airways advertisement in the back of National Geographic Magazine, advertising the China Clipper Flying Boat service across the Pacific. A handsome man in white linen suit and Panama hat is sitting across from a beautiful lady in a lacy white cotton dress and white summer hat, sharing two cool, fruit laden drinks in tall frosted glasses at a small round table between two tall palm trees that frame a dark blue lagoon in which floated, smack in the middle, riding sedately at anchor, a beautiful white PanAm China Clipper.
Dad had always dreamed of flying, but youthful love, early marriage and the inevitable onset of children, their needs and his meager resources dictated otherwise.
He often repeated the wistful promise “…someday son, someday I’ll take you for a ride in one of those airplanes….”
It was to be longer than he thought. And it was not he who took me for a ride in the airplane.
Years passed, the young men who flew out of the pastures for two dollars a ride went on somewhere else, perhaps to PanAm or the other Airlines, perhaps to the wars, of which there were many.
The bright blue, green, red and yellow lacquered biplanes were replaced by shiny aluminum monoplanes which got bigger and faster, acquired more engines, guns, and were emblazoned with stars, roundels, crosses and suns.
And, now that everyone had much more money, rides no longer cost two dollars.
I had grown and gone off. Wars, work and family intervened and Dad had grown grayer. Strangely enough, although I was much bigger, had grown in important places, lost it in others, and had raised children of my own, I did not feel any older inside and I still carried the memory of those colorful airplanes in the farmer’s field and that small table beside the lagoon.
I had discovered that the lagoon was probably modeled after the Pan American Flying Boat refueling and layover base in Nadi, Fiji, although it could have been anywhere else in the South Pacific. I had even had a drink or two on that beach at Tomba ko Nadi, but the little round table was not there and the tourists I saw were not at all as fit, well-groomed and dressed as that handsome couple in the poster. I had also discovered that flying airplanes was not always “blue skies and pop-corn clouds.”
Dad had retired long ago after a life of long and hard, but productive, work.
I was on leave, transferring between duty stations, having decided to make the Navy a career after a couple of wars. I stopped at home for a week while traveling across the country.
J.D. was an old friend from the neighborhood. He had flown with the U.S. Army Air Corps in the latter months of the Big War. Blacked out, twin engined night-fighters, Vampires, Black Beauties, or something like that, as I recall. Dad mentioned that he was back home and running a small aero-photography operation with one small airplane out at the local airfield.
The pastures, too, had come up in the world and now had a gravel strip, hangars, a fuel pump, a small office and the grand title of Municipal Airfield!
I called J.D. and set up a meet out at the airstrip. He couldn’t lend me his own airplane, it was totally inadequate and, as he said, you gotta know this plane intimately to make it go up and come down in the same condition. But, he had a friend who owned a Champion 7-AC who would, he was sure, be glad to lend me his aircraft for a few hours. A phone call and, with J.D.’s endorsement of my abilities, it was done.
I hauled Dad out to the car after breakfast the next morning and told him we were going for a ride…out to the airfield where he used to take me as a child. Nice!
He was pleased and surprised when we pulled up beside the little yellow monoplane with the red engine cowl and he caught on to the idea that it was in this little airplane that we were going to “go for the ride.”
It was a nice day; a cold, crisp and clear January afternoon in Southern Michigan. The trees were black and bare and there was snow on the ground.
We cranked up (I had to do the hand-prop, pull-the-chocks-and-jump-in fast by myself, Dad would not even think of standing under that sharp wood prop and pulling down on it). We taxied out, eased off, flew out over a white, frozen Lake St. Clair and toured low and slow among the ice-fishing shacks out on the lake.
“We used to fish out here when you were little, son. Remember?” Of course I remembered, why else were we here?
On the way back to the airstrip, we grab a few thousand feet and, “Ready, Dad?” …we pull a nice big, soft and smooth loop, then,…let her build up some airspeed,…pull back up to a stall,…and she falls into a lazy spin. Dad sat back there grinning and hanging onto airplane with both hands.
One loop, one spin; that was enough for an airplane that old and someone else’s at that. We head home.
The turbulence below two thousand is more than he can handle and, a few hundred feet out on final I get a tap on the shoulder to turn and see a struggling, embarrassed old man with bulging cheeks, baseball cap in hand and eyes popping the question, “Where?” I indicate that I am busy at the moment, to just open the door, throw out the hat and chuck up the rest.
Doors make great speed brakes if you ever need one on a Champion 7-AC, and I was pleased that my old Basic Flight Instructor had thoroughly drilled me on slips to a landing because we completed our final in a steep forward slip, crabbing sideways down into the field.
As we drove home, he remarked, “That was my dream! Now, I’ve flown with my son; and he took me for a ride in his own airplane!”
A Note:
I subsequently took my own sons for “rides in airplanes.” The first time when they were about four and five, in a Cessna 120. Many times later, as they grew older, in !70’s 172’s a J-3, and a Navion. Once, I was able to sneak them both into the rear seat of a T-34, and show them some upside down flying.
Both are successful businessmen now, with no interest in airplanes. It’s computers and cars… and a hellova lot more money than I ever saw! And, they get to sleep at home every night.